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Prairie Village native puts face on death penalty debate

Tom Goldstein, who now lives in California, exonerated after 24 years in prison

Prairie Village native Tom Goldstein testifies Wednesday about being exonerated after serving 24 years in California prisons for a crime he didn't commit.

Goldstein told the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee that speaking about his wrongful conviction makes some good out of "long, long wasted lonely years in prison."

There was a standing-room-only crowd for Wednesday's informational hearing on Senate Substitute for House Bill 2389.

Kristafer Ailslieger, a deputy solicitor general from the attorney general's office who has worked on death penalty cases, said a bill to expedite the appeals process will reduce "unreasonable delays." Ailslieger showed the committee the mammoth appellate briefs on the podium, which he called evidence of defendants intentionally dragging out the process.

For more than two decades Tom Goldstein proclaimed his innocence as he was shuttled from one California prison to another after a murder conviction.

Inmates laughed and pointed out others around them who were "innocent, too." Counselors yelled at him. His initial appeal attempt was denied.

Still, Goldstein toiled in the prison law libraries, looking for a second chance. To keep his sanity he leaned on meditation, his Jewish faith and the TV show the “X-Files,” with its well-known tagline.

It took 24 years, but the truth finally came out in Goldstein's case. An investigation into another murder trial revealed that a jailhouse informant used in both cases had lied under oath when he testified against Goldstein. Subsequent legal action showed that the detectives who investigated the murder had coerced the lone eyewitness into picking Goldstein out of a lineup.

Goldstein, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, still lives in California, but he grew up in Prairie Village. Opponents of the Kansas death penalty made him the face of their cause Wednesday as they spoke against a bill to speed up the appeals process for death row inmates.

Ron Wurtz, a lawyer who is vice chairman of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty's board of directors, said he wasn't sure why the expedited appeals bill came forth this year, because there have always been some who were upset at how long the state takes from conviction to execution.

“There’s a reason for that," Wurtz said. "To make sure it’s not arbitrarily imposed and innocent people don’t get executed.”

Wurtz said examples of the unreliability of Kansas capital murder sentences include Gary Kleypas, Michael Marsh, Gavin Scott, Stanley Elms and Phillip Cheatham — all of whom had their sentences reversed after their first appeals revealed "serious errors" in the original trials.

Cheatham will be retried for the 2003 slayings of two Topeka women after the Kansas Supreme Court decided his attorney was ineffective in the original case, in part because he referred to Cheatham as a "professional drug dealer" and "shooter of people."

Proponents of Senate Substitute for House Bill 2389, which passed the Senate 27-13, say it would still allow for plenty of appeal opportunities, both at the state and federal level. The bill sets a time limit of 3.5 years for the Kansas Supreme Court to hear death penalty appeals and also instructs state courts to set aside other work in order to prioritize capital cases.

Supporters include Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and a group representing the state's district and county attorneys.

Kristafer Ailslieger, a deputy solicitor general from the attorney general's office who has worked on death penalty cases, said page limits within the bill would simply codify existing rules the judicial branch hasn’t always followed.

Ailslieger displayed mammoth appellate briefs Wednesday and said the bill in question would reduce "unreasonable delays."

Kansas reinstated the death penalty 20 years ago, but no one has been executed in that time. There are nine inmates on the state's death row.

Opponents of the death penalty got hearings on a bill to repeal it in Kansas this year, but thus far no action has been taken on that. They presented the preliminary results of a study that showed capital punishment has cost the state millions, in part because of the required appeals.

Wurtz and Mary Sloan, the anti-death penalty coalition's executive director, said the bill to expedite appeals would actually increase those costs because the judicial system would likely need more employees to meet the mandate.

But Sloan said the main argument against the bill is moral.

“There are serious consequences to try to rush and speed up and expedite the appeals process," Sloan said. "Because it takes a long time for the truth to come out.”

Rep. Steven Becker, R-Buhler, a former judge who has led the death penalty repeal effort in the House, said the average time from conviction to exoneration in murder cases overturned is 24 years.

"This bill takes it through the state process in eight or 10 years,” Becker said. “(For) people like Mr. Goldstein, how scary is that?”

Goldstein told the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee that his testimony Wednesday was in honor of Tommy Thompson, the man whose execution spurred the investigation into the jailhouse informant that led to Goldstein's conviction being overturned.

“Had he lived until 2001, I believe his case would have been overturned and he probably would be a free man today,” Goldstein said.